A World Between

by Norman Spinrad

  Decorous but spontaneous cheering broke out. “Second the motion! Second the motion!” Dozens of Delegates were calling for the vote. Royce smiled at Carlotta smugly, knowing that he had cunningly recrafted the issue at hand into a resolution that no one could seriously argue against and hope to remain in office. Closed session or not, he thought, that was one hell of a speech, and I’m going to release the tape to the news channels—it’s perfect for our purposes.

  Carlotta’s face was utterly sphinxlike as she gaveled the Delegates to order. “If there are no objections, I call for a vote on the Minister’s motion,” she said evenly.

  Of course there were none, and the motion sailed through, 80 to 23. And in a move that surprised even Royce, he himself was voted onto the delegation as the majority opinion member, along with Carlotta, and Lauren Golding from the Cords for the small minority, even though he was usually considered Carlotta’s shadow.

  It filled Royce with a rare sense of totally private pride to think that the Delegates had recognized his independent existence to such an extent. But on the other hand, Carlotta had been able to avoid taking any strong position at all, so as things stood now, it was he who publicly represented her position as if it were his own, and she who appeared to remain above it all, the obedient servant of a Parliamentary consensus that he had marshaled behind her. It was hard to figure out who was the puppet and who the puppeteer.

  The disc of the setting-sun behind them was cleanly bisected by the razor-sharp western horizon, and the surface of the sea was a glaze of deepening gold as Carlotta Madigan sat thoughtfully in the open cockpit of the Golden Goose watching Royce sail the boat back to Lorien. Dozing boomerbirds rode the light swell, their heads tucked peacefully into their bright yellow breast feathers. Far away to port, the translucent hump of a big jellybelly glowed eerily in the twilight.

  The world seemed at peace as it edged into night, and Royce was like a little boy, thoroughly absorbed in the delicate task of extracting the maximum speed from the light following wind. Carlotta had secured the mandate she wanted from Parliament, and the unforeseen election of Royce to the delegation had even given her a welcome but unexpected effective control. The ship of state seemed to be making its way through its troubled waters almost as smoothly as the Golden Goose gliding along the surface of this tranquil sea. Yet something disturbed the peace of this moment on a deep level that she could not quite plug her conscious mind into, and the elusiveness of it made it doubly annoying.

  And somehow it was focused on Royce. He had been so damned pleased with himself, so much the triumphant bucko, that there had been no way to deny him this slow, crawling surface sail back to Lorien. Surely this isn’t too much for me to endure for the sake of my bright young bucko, Carlotta thought. Especially when he’s served me as well as he has today.

  But that is what’s bothering me, she suddenly realized. Not the sail, but the way Royce steered that resolution through today. And the way he built the press release around his own speech afterward. He maneuvered Parliament the way he sails a boat, tacking with the wind, gliding frictionlessly through the storm, without ever facing the real issue head-on and powering through it.

  What if this Falkenstein is a political sailor like Royce? What if he fools us all and accepts the conditions Royce assumed would be unacceptable? If he says yes—no matter what it really means—how can we say no—especially with Royce so publicly identified with the line we’re taking? Wouldn’t it have been better to have gotten a loud no vote on principle up front, even though the margin of victory would’ve been much smaller than this overwhelming but ambiguous consensus?

  But Royce had made the decision for her. He had acted unilaterally, and now he at least appeared publicly to be the pilot of a policy he had created. This was something new in their political relationship, and she didn’t like it. And truth be told, she didn’t much like herself for not liking it. Are you some kind of crypto-Femocrat at heart, Carlotta Madigan? she asked herself half-seriously. Does your bucko always have to walk two steps behind you?

  “Do you really believe everything you said today, Royce?” she asked.

  Royce glanced at her peculiarly.

  “I mean, what if Falkenstein accepts the conditions in the resolution? How do we say no to an Institute of Transcendental Science then?”

  Royce laughed. “First of all, I think the chances of that happening are zip,” he said. “Secondly, if he should accept our conditions, what would be wrong with having an Institute anyway?”

  “What?”

  “What do you mean, what?” Royce snapped. “I meant what I said. If we can have Transcendental Science without political strings, without interference in our way of life, and without helping to maintain their monopoly, then why not? Give me one good reason!”

  “Why…ah…I guess it’s just a gut-feeling, Royce,” Carlotta said lamely, unable to explain it even to herself. “I mean, who wants the Pink and Blue War…?”

  “But if Falkenstein accepts our terms—which he won’t anyway—how does that involve us in the Pink and Blue War? If anything, it’ll help end the damned thing. Without the Transcendental Science monopoly, the dynamic for the war no longer exists. Truth be told, that’s what I’d like to see happen. Wouldn’t you?”

  “Ah…er, I suppose so,” Carlotta said distantly. “I guess I’m just a little edgy…Something about that Falkenstein bothers me on an irrational level, is all…”

  “Hmmmm…” Royce muttered, and turned his attention back to the set of the sails and the sea before him. As the first stars of night began to dust the darkening sky, the two of them sat apart, brooding on their own private thoughts.

  That in itself disturbed Carlotta as she gazed up at the night sky. For truth be told, Carlotta hated the thing that was moving toward them with a passion beyond all rational political logic. It seemed that the shadow of the Arkology Heisenberg had already darkened their own intimate landscape.

  4

  Dr. Roger Falkenstein felt that he stood at the brink of a mission that might be a major inflection point in the upward curve of human history. Or a break-point in the steady hyperbolic rise should he fail.

  Rising through the liftube at the long axis of the Heisenberg from his quarters on 12-deck to the main briefing room on 2-deck, Falkenstein passed through nine typical decks of the Arkology, which he thought of as neither vehicle of transit nor home.

  Three of the decks through which he passed were nothing more than human warehouses: tier upon tier of Deep Sleep chambers in which, at any given time, the majority of the Arkology’s inhabitants spent the years between meaningful activities in suspended animation, editing their long lifespans into continuous dramas of peak experiences by removing all periods of boredom and waiting.

  Partially as a result of this instant access to Deep Sleep, where both body metabolism and memory track could be frozen into a timeless moment while objective years or even centuries flowed by unnoticed, the residential decks of the Arkology were for the most part starkly functional. Circles of spacious apartments surrounded the central drop and lift tubes with only a token formal garden here and there. Color schemes varied, but generally ran to bright primaries, golds, whites, and metallics—colors well calculated to energize the mind and brighten the spirit, but equally well calculated to avoid the earth-tones that would psychologically simulate growing things or the surfaces of planets. Even the paintings in the apartments, the murals in the public areas of the Arkology, and the motifs of the artificial “skies” above each deck tended almost entirely to the astronomical—star fields, great banded gas giants, complex multiple-star systems, stylized black holes, blazing novas. Growing things were for the most part confined to the hydroponic decks, where the vats were arranged in neat rows and the plants provided food, animal fodder, and oxygen; fuel for the human metabolism, not a narcotic for the soul.

  The psychic heart of an Arkology consisted of the lab decks and the computer deck and the communications deck that linked
all planetbound Institutes of Transcendental Science and all Arkologies into a unified culture that could truly be said to be galactic, at least in a primitive sense. Homo galacticus had at least evolved to the point where he needed no psychological simulacrums of his planetary past any more than planetbound humans needed to live in simulations of the treetop world from which their remote ancestors had descended.

  And now we are poised for the next step, Falkenstein thought as he reached 2-deck. And fate has chosen me as the nexus of evolutionary forces, as the instantaneous instrument of the process which has taken our species from the trees to the stars, and which is now battering against the very limits of the naturally evolved universe. Now we must evolve beyond evolution itself or sink inexorably backward into the primordial slime.

  The main briefing room was a circular domed chamber; a round white table filled the center of the room, the floor was carpeted in light gray, and the walls were a seamless expanse of pale blue broken only by a large computer display screen and a speaker grid. Computer access was strictly voice-activated here, so that the Arkmind could take part as just another colleague.

  The domed ceiling was a single great screen that could be opaqued to a soothing pearl gray or illumined with an appropriate abstraction from the artbanks, or, as it was now, turned into a “window” onto the space outside the Arkology’s inertia screen.

  Now the great globe of Pacifica hung above the table, a cloud-swirled ball of greens, browns, and brilliant blue suspended in the perpetual blackness of star-filled space. White icecaps gleamed at either pole. The great curving horn of the main continent of Columbia half-cradled the vast Island Continent as if it had just flung an armful of green jewels eastward across the azure sea. The Big Blue River and its tributaries were clearly visible like a network of blue veins draining the green and gold eastern plains. The Sierra Cordillera cleanly divided the western portion of Columbia, furred with green on the western slopes, outlining the sere brown of the desert interior. At this magnification, even the city of Gotham winked at the edge of visibility at the delta-mouth of the Big Blue, like a tiny chip of shiny metal intermittently catching the light of the sun. The immense ball above utterly dominated the room. It was a tangibly living planet, huge, verdant, and, with its perpetual slow swirl and ebb of white cloud patterns, organic and breathing, palpably alive.

  Five men and a woman sat around the white table. Carlos Miranda, one of the Heisenberg’s Link Officers, had been out of Deep Sleep for a year on his regular tour. The other four men were specialists who had been awakened when the Heisenberg entered the Pacifican solar system specifically to background this mission: Lar Dalton, Psychopolitician; Harry Eisen, head of the Survey Update Team; Winston Cornelle, Historical Analysis, and Artur Polichev, Legal Advisor.

  Together, these five men represented the apexes of five Situation Task Forces of up to twenty men apiece specifically formed to deal with all aspects of the Pacifica mission. The men in this room gave Falkenstein access to more depth information on Pacifica than the Pacificans had on themselves.

  And then there was Maria. Falkenstein’s wife was one of the few female graduates of an Institute of Transcendental Science, specialty Projection, which had no immediate relevance to the Pacifica mission. But Psychopolitics had determined that a husband-wife negotiation team was the optimum sync with the Pacifican psychopolitical matrix. One lone ambassador-plenipotentiary would offend their democratic ideology, and a team of experts would tend to arouse their paranoia and point too sharply to their total scientific inferiority. Further, the Pacifican sexual power balance leaned subtly toward the female—though the Pacificans themselves kept this just below the level of full conscious awareness—and a sexually balanced negotiating team was therefore highly desirable.

  Besides, Falkenstein knew that he functioned best with Maria at his side—he was a rare and lucky man to have a wife of her intellectual quality—and he would have brought her along no matter what analysis Psychopolitics had come up with.

  “Very well,” Falkenstein said, taking his seat next to Maria with a quick private glance of greeting, “this will be our last chance to run through the scenario before Maria and I go planetside. Arkmind, please monitor. Maria, please summarize.”

  A strange look passed briefly across Maria’s even features—annoyance, pride, perhaps both. Annoyance at being treated like a student at an oral exam, pride at being accorded the status of aide-de-camp to the Managing Director, who happened to be her husband. Falkenstein’s motivations were also mixed. He wanted to be sure she had internalized the scenario thoroughly, but he also wanted to assure the others of her competence. Despite the projections of Psychopolitics, there was still a certain reluctance to entrust a woman with this level of responsibility, and the fact that Maria was his wife only added another layer of ambiguity.

  “Roger and I will be negotiating with a delegation consisting of the Chairman, Carlotta Madigan; the Minister of Media, Royce Lindblad; and Lauren Golding, a Good Old Mountain Boy Delegate representing the minority faction most favorable to our position,” Maria said crisply. “Lindblad is Madigan’s lover and political ally; therefore, she is in effective control of the delegation.”

  “Correction,” said Eisen. “It was Lindblad who proposed the motion their Parliament passed, and Lindblad who has done most of the speaking for the administration position. Madigan has carefully avoided taking a public position. Therefore, he may very well be acting independently.”

  “Almost certainly a political ploy on her part,” Dalton insisted. “Their personal relationship syncs into the dominant Pacifican female-superior mode, and Lindblad has never opposed her on a significant political issue.”

  “But historically, the Pacifican Minister of Media has been a political figure of significant independence, frequently in opposition to the Chairman,” Cornelle said.

  “But the current situation is an anomaly and therefore historical analysis does not—”

  Maria smiled thinly at Eisen. “Is this psychopolitical analysis, Harry, or do you just find the concept of a dominant female political figure in an egalitarian society hard to swallow?”

  Eisen flushed. Falkenstein laughed, but no one else laughed with him. “This is irrelevant,” he said. “The operative fact is that the Pacifican Parliament has overwhelmingly instructed the delegation to reject an Institute of Transcendental Science on anything like reasonable terms. Whether this was engineered by Madigan or not, she is bound by the instructions of her Parliament. Maria, will you please continue from there…”

  “Therefore, the Arkmind has projected the almost certain failure of the negotiations,” Maria said in flat professional tones. “Even if Lindblad or Madigan should unexpectedly side with Golding and the delegation should accept our proposal, Parliament would have to ratify it, and if an immediate vote were taken, it would certainly be negative, and that would be the end of it.”

  “Correction,” said Polichev. “If Madigan supported the Institute and Parliament then turned it down, there would then be a planetwide electronic vote of confidence. If she won, a new Parliament would be elected which would likely overturn the previous vote.”

  “A train of events which the Arkmind projects as virtually impossible,” Falkenstein said testily. “Can we please stick to the main lines of the scenario? Maria…”

  “Therefore, we must avoid an immediate confrontation when our proposal is turned down,” Maria continued. “We ask for time to study their counterproposals. We formally request permission to remain in orbit around Pacifica in the meantime. With the utmost politeness and reasonableness. The Arkmind predicts that the Madigan delegation cannot deny such a request without risking a vote of confidence on the wrong side of the issue of simple galactic protocol.” Maria smiled, knowing she had stated it all well. “That concludes phase one of the scenario.”

  “Very good,” Falkenstein said. “But perhaps we had better look ahead and clarify phase two. Artur, will you verify the timing for me again
?”

  “Once the fact that we’ve been given permission to remain in orbit has been released to the Pacifican media, it will be irreversible except by vote of Parliament,” the Legal Advisor said. “Say overnight, for safety’s sake.”

  “At which point I invoke Article 12, Section 3 of the Pacifican Constitution…” Falkenstein said.

  “Section 2, Roger,” Polichev corrected. “No one—and the phrasing clearly does not exclude non-Pacificans—may be denied a public net channel or may be prevented from purchasing time on free market channels except by reason of judicially declared criminal intent or in order to advocate the overthrow of the Pacifican government or Constitution by extralegal means.”

  “They won’t like it, but they’ll have to swallow it,” Dalton said. “Aside from the legalism, the Pacificans are absolute fanatics on the subject of free media access—it almost has the psychic force of a religious commandment. We’ll have them caught by their own deepest convictions.”

  Falkenstein drummed his fingers on the table nervously. “There’s one hole that I can see in phase two,” he said. “They can’t deny us media access once we invoke their own Constitution, but they’re not going to like it. Might they then not simply revoke their permission for us to remain in their solar system? Arkmind, a projection on that, please…”

  “Sixty to forty negative under the present scenario,” said the cool, soothing voice of the computer.

  Falkenstein frowned. “Not nearly good enough,” he said. “How can we raise the odds to at least 75-25 in our favor?”

  “Politicize the issue immediately,” Dalton suggested. “In local psychosexual terms.”

  “Elucidate.”

  “Transcendental Science’s image is male-dominant—”

  “I wonder where they got that idea?” Maria muttered. Falkenstein shot her an angry glance.